11/26/14

Understanding My Femininity Doesn’t Take Away From My Masculinity

The heart of a human being is no
different from the soul of heaven and earth. In your practice always keep in
your thoughts the interaction of heaven and earth, water and fire, yin and
yang.

Morihei Ueshiba

We are constantly told what to think and how to
act by society, as it imposes “traditional” ideas. Even when we confront them,
we are in a way recognizing and validating these ideas as “traditions” that must
be challenged. Yet, what happens when we realize that what we believe are “traditional”
ideals are really modern concepts and inventions with no real practical application.
We are then free from even accepting them.

We see this constant reinforcement of how men
must be masculine and must shy away from anything that could be considered effeminate,
in the same way that women are bombarded by ideals of femininity and must avoid
acting in a way that could be considered “butch.” We are also told that these
are the traditional gender roles, roles that must be challenged if we want to
achieve gender equality by removing gender ideals.

But what if I told you that the actual
traditional ideal is that everyone has a masculine and feminine aspect to them,
irrelevant to their biological sex.

Yes, I am going to give you today a short
history and philosophy class. The term feminine and masculine, just as manhood and
womanhood didn’t even exist in western culture till the late 14th
century. Before that, people where simply defined by their role within a
society. Yes, there was a distinction between men and women, but mostly defined
by the idea that women procreated and men defended. This becomes rather
important in a society when half of the population of the known world just got
wiped out by plague and war.

It wasn’t till mid-20th century that
the idea of men being exclusively masculine and women being exclusively feminine
came about. Before that, all men and women where considered to poses both,
masculine and feminine aspects. It was actually promoted to find a personal
balance between these two sides within a person. The most evident and obvious
example of this ideal is within the notions of Yin and Yang.

Yin & Yang describes how apparent opposite
forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in both
nature and man. They give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another
in their duality, be it light and dark, fire and water, or simply male and
female. We have to note that neither is viewed as good and the other as bad,
but simply two sides of the same coin.

Yin and Yang are thought as complementary,
rather than opposing, forces in a dynamic universe in which the whole is
greater than the parts. Everything and everyone has both Yin and Yang aspects:

Yin being negative, passive, and the feminine principals
of nature, represented by the moon.

Yang being the positive, active, and the masculine
principals of nature, represented by the sun.

(Note that negative and positive in this
context have nothing to do with good or bad.)

This duality and balance between the masculine
and feminine aspects of a person was actually something sought out and promoted…
till someone thought it a good idea to create even a greater rift between men
and women around the 1950’s.

Does that mean that women and men were equal
before this time? No, and that is the reason why we fight so hard to promote
gender equality. But gender equality, or any equality should never be about sameness.

What this means is how if we are able to
understand that we all have a feminine and a masculine side, maybe we would be a
lot more open minded to the idea of empathizing with each other, and we could
actually be able to break down the barriers between the genders. Maybe men
could actually realize that they can understand women, and women could actually
realize that they can understand men.

Club Men

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